This is the first novel that Charlotte Brontכ completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne\'s Agnes Grey and Emily\'s Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte\'s death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on Charlotte\'s experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842. Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the only male narrator that she used, this work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Brontכ\'s hero escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher, who is perhaps the author\'s most realistic feminist heroine. The Professor endures today as both a harbinger of Brontכ\'s later novels and a compelling read in its own right.~The characters define this story. Charlotte Bronte did a very good job of defining them, especially the main character William Crimsworth. He is a reserved man, but has compassion, though some say he does not. I\'d also say that he is an observer of character, and learns about others through his own study and watchfulness. He studies their expressions to understand them better. He is a man of thinking, and very dutiful and faithful in his tasks. Overall, I really enjoyed his character, and the simple romance of this book. I finished it in about two or three days, so that should say how I liked it. There is a lot of French in this book, and I had to translate it, just to warn you.--Submitted by Anonymous~The Professor: an Introduction by a Prejudiced Writer who used to avoid reading Charlotte Brontכ.For those who have enjoyed Agnes Grey by Anne Brontכ, for those who thought Jane Eyre remarkably well written yet somehow a little too overrated, Charlotte Brontכs The Professor is the sort of book that compiles meticulous yet tolerable narrative style with a very down-to-earth, sometimes dauntingly realistic plot. There are no great outbursts of passion coming out of the protagonists mouth; not even when he is feeling it does he dare express passion at its fullness. And yet The Professor somehow makes the reader feel his passion; it makes the reader feel pain, financial hardship, moral sacrifice, and, eventually, pure, honest, even shy love. For even when the main character himself, Mr. Wakefield, hardly ever succumbs to evidencing his own feelings in front of other charactersamong whom are his heartless brother and vain Miss Reutereven then, Charlotte Brontכ somehow leads the reader to guess at her characters thoughts, to predict his morals before he has appealed to his manners.If this is your first approach to Charlottכ Brontכ, I ought to say beware of descriptions. They can be long, and they can seem uninteresting at first glance. Yes, she can give the false impression of dwelling more on landscape than on characterization. However, the psyche of each and every character is, in fact, very well worked out and to such an extent that one might even trust that all such things as are unravelled in the novel did happenstill happen, and that all such people did really exist in mid Victorian England.